Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

by Tim Harford

Despite the obvious limitations of this approach, Limb and other neuroscientists19 have been discovering some intriguing hints about what goes on in an improvising brain. When they recruited six professional jazz pianists to improvise short passages of music, comparing them with scales and memorized tunes, Limb and Allen Braun consistently found an intriguing pattern in the prefrontal cortex.20 This is the part of the brain that is most distinctively human when comparing our brains with those of animals. “It’s where the apparent seat of consciousness resides,” says Limb. “Complex memory, sense of self, sense of morality, sense of humor. Higher-order cognitive processing is all implicated in the prefrontal cortex.”21 No surprise, then, that the prefrontal cortex behaves unusually during musical improvisation. But the striking pattern is that rather than being fired up during improvisation, some fairly broad areas of the prefrontal cortex are being shut down. (These are the dorsolateral areas, on either side of the top of your forehead, and the lateral orbital areas, behind your eyes.) At the same time, the medial frontal area, behind the bridge of your nose, becomes more active. Not only was this pattern robust in the work on jazz improv, it also emerges from a separate study of freestyle rappers by Braun and others.22 What does this all mean? It suggests that improvisers are suppressing their conscious control and letting go. Most of us go through our days censoring our ow...